Simon Dingle » Human achievement

Stephen Wiltshire sketches Manhattan skyline from memory

Simon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:56:06 +0000

I believe art to be most transcendent during its creation.

Thanks to Wes Blackmore who blogged it earlier this week I have been enjoying live video of British artist Stephen Wiltshire who is currently hard at work sketching the Manhattan skyline as a panorama, using only his memory as reference. Stephen’s website tells the story of this project and has pictures, notes and recordings from the artist. You can also watch a live webcam of Stephen completing the work on his site, or below.

Video clips at Ustream

Balloon carries Canon camera to edge of space

Simon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:38:33 +0000

The Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio (BEAR) project has launched a Canon HD video camera to the edge of space using a high-altitude balloon. The resultant video is posted below and shows the ascent of the camera from a launch site in Canada in August 2009 with stunning visuals captured at the height of the ascent before the balloon was lost.

More information on the project and how the camera and balloon were prepared can be found on the BEAR-4 website.

Google celebrates Hans Christian Ørsted

Simon — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:03:14 +0000

Visitors to the Google landing page on 14 August 2009 would have seen the special logo that the search giant put up for the day, which celebrates the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted who was born in 1777.

Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who made numerous contributions to science. He is probably best known for discovering that electric currents can induce magnetic fields, paving the way for breakthroughs in electromagnetism – and, ultimately, leading to modern communications solutions such as cellular communications, and countless others.

He also had an impact on modern philosophy and was the first person to explicitly describe and name the ‘thought experiment’. One of the most commonly-known examples of a thought experiment is ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ that provides an hypothesis used in quantum mechanics.

As a critical thinker in the 18th century, imagine the friction Ørsted must have dealt with on a daily basis from a European public largely taken with religion and mysticism.

As always, Google picks up on worthy celebrations and uses its logo to pronounce them. Which is rad.

Between heartbeats

Simon — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:49:40 +0000

I first learned of Willard Wigan’s work a year ago, when I saw the video below. Since then I have just assumed that everyone knew about him, but apparently not. I often talk about Willard’s work and what it teaches us about mastery, throwing in examples from one of my favourite books on the subject of success, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Often when I do this I hear people ask, “Who is Willard Wigan.”

Who indeed.

Watch this video if you haven’t already and I’m sure you, like me, will be blown away by this remarkable man.